at's the whole story
of those poor little ones. It's too late for them, they are dead." Then
in her turn she broke down and began to sob. "Poor little ones! poor
little ones! Look how white they are, and think what they will be when
only the bones of their heads lie side by side on the cushion, and only
the bones of their arms still clasp one another. Ah! may they sleep, may
they sleep; at least they know nothing and feel nothing now."

A long interval of silence followed. Pierre, amidst the quiver of his own
doubts, the anxious desire which in common with most men he felt for a
new life beyond the grave, gazed at this woman who did not find priests
to her fancy, and who retained all her Beauceronne frankness of speech,
with the tranquil, contented air of one who has ever done her duty in her
humble station as a servant, lost though she had been for five and twenty
years in a land of wolves, whose language she had not even been able to
learn. Ah! yes, tortured as the young man was by his doubts, he would
have liked to be as she was, a well-balanced, healthy, ignorant creature
who was quite content with what the world offered, and who, when she had
accomplished her daily task, went fully satisfied to bed, careless as to
whether she might never wake again!

However, as Pierre's eyes once more sought the state bed, he suddenly
recognised the old priest, who was kneeling on the step of the platform,
and whose features he had hitherto been unable to distinguish. "Isn't
that Abbe Pisoni, the priest of Santa Brigida, where I sometimes said
mass?" he inquired. "The poor old man, how he weeps!"

In her quiet yet desolate voice Victorine replied, "He has good reason to
weep. He did a fine thing when he took it into his head to marry my poor
Benedetta to Count Prada. All those abominations would never have
happened if the poor child had been given her Dario at once. But in this
idiotic city they are all mad with their politics; and that old priest,
who is none the less a very worthy man, thought he had accomplished a
real miracle and saved the world by marrying the Pope and the King as he
said with a soft laugh, poor old _savant_ that he is, who for his part
has never been in love with anything but old stones--you know, all that
antiquated rubbish of theirs of a hundred thousand years ago. And now,
you see, he can't keep from weeping. The other one too came not twenty
minutes ago, Father Lorenza, the Jesuit who became the Contess